I will never get over how great some of the old video game art is. Yars was pretty sweet, looking at it now I didn’t realize that it was airbrushed. The cover art reminds me of t-shirts you would buy on the boardwalk of a New England beach town.

Yars came up because I was talking to my kids and they mentioned inventing a back story for a video game that didn’t really have any context. When we were playing on Atari 2600 consoles we often did that. You were a weird creature of character performing some kind of weird action without knowing why, so we created the why in our heads.

Because of this problem in early games Atari would sometimes package back story mini-comics with their cartridges. The art was usually pretty strong, but the stories were dumbed down for a general audience. As you read them don’t be surprised if the stories are a little inane, but for me they were a gateway to build a whole story around these simple activities.